World Cup 2018 facilities to cost $3 billion

MOSCOW, December 02. /ITAR-TASS/. Stadium-building for World Cup 2018 in Russia will cost about 100 billion rubles (about $3 billion), director general of the organizing committee Aleksey Sorokin told Itar-Tass.

“We are staying on schedule. The arena project for Samara will be referred for examination any day now,” Sorokin said.

Projects for six other stadiums in Nizhny Novgorod, Rostov-on-Don, Saransk, Volgograd, Yekaterinburg and Kaliningrad as well as rebuilding the Luzhniki complex in Moscow would be examined next year, he added.

Sorokin expressed confidence that all World Cup stadiums would be constructed in 2014, saying there were no reasons for concern as building a football arena took an average of 2.5-3 years.

Eleven Russian cities will host World Cup 2018. Stadiums Spartak (Otkrytie Arena) in Moscow and Zenit-Arena in St. Petersburg are now being built. The Olympic Stadium will open in Sochi in February.

The major sports arena Luzhniki, to host the final, is now under reconstruction. Meanwhile, a stadium in Kazan built for the 2013 World Student Games will hold the first football match as soon as next spring.

Total spending on the World Cup would amount to 660 billion rubles ($20 billion), Sorokin said, no more and no less than stipulated in the governmental program. Federal funds provided 336 billion roubles ($10 billion) of this amount, he added.

Most of the expenses would be for infrastructure, and a lion's share of infrastructure projects — airport terminals, runways, metro stations — would have been implemented anyway, Sorokin said.

“There is nothing irrelevant, nothing that will be constructed solely for the World Cup and will not be demanded after the contest is over,” he said, adding that competition was a catalyst for the cities’ infrastructure, including sporting facilities. “As a country claiming a place among top 10 football powers, Russia needs modern stadiums,” he said.